It would be a better idea to unsquash it along with its dependencies directly to the root of your remastered corepure64.gzAnd then create empty files in the /usr/local/tce.installed/ directory to prevent reloading.

Assume that you are talking about scsi-KERNEL.tcz (scsi-4.8.17-tinycore64.tcz)It does not depend on any other extensions.So you won't need other extensions copied.Also, make sure to add an empty file scsi-KERNEL (scsi-4.8.17-tinycore64) to /usr/local/tce.installed/

I tce-loaded scsi-4.8.17-tinycore64.tcz. After it installed , i copied the /usr/local/lib directory structure into the extracted usr/local/lib preserving all links and doing a depmod on the extracted core directory.

the core_extract was remastered to corepure64.gz and booted. It looks fine but device discovery never kicks off. I'm guessing the tce-load does a modprobe to get the device to wake up.

if so, what's the method that prevents it from modprobing non-existant devices unless it's a device enumeration request?

sudo ln -s "$INPUT/usr/local/lib/modules/$KERNEL/kernel" "$INPUT/lib/modules/$KERNEL/kernel.tclocal"sudo depmod -a -b "$INPUT" $KERNELwhere $INPUT is the directory you extracted core.gz into (f.e. "/tmp/core") and $KERNEL is the kernel version this core.gz is for (f.e. "4.2.9-tinycore").